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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#71

Post by Jorge1o1 »

fixermark wrote: post #42

I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years. So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

Disagree about the MS point a bit.

Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around.

So maybe they killed Clippy, but that guy

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#72

Post by jacquesm »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #39
jaimex2 wrote: post #13

Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done. I thought the whole point of Alphabet was to try and hide the Google brand so customers trust to use it.

> Damaging? Its very clear the damage is done. In the HN community certainly, but also for consumers?

If you lose your early adopters you lose everything in the longer run. Every new product needs early adopters.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#73

Post by maxxxxx »

holdenc wrote: post #7

Hopefully Google will see this and better understand why Microsoft is beating them in cloud services. When I moved about a TB of S3 data into their cloud storage (as a cross-vendor backup) one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. I was floored. But I mentioned that their constant shut downs are making me wary of a larger Google Cloud commitment.

“one of their product evangelists called me just to say hello. ”

They are good at that but if you need actual support they are much less eager to talk to you.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#75

Post by malvosenior »

meddlepal wrote: post #35

Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.

You forgot probably their only actually good product: maps

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#76

Post by HALtheWise »

ryandvm wrote: post #38
chii wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more like a university than a business which is wrong for google to behave this way, as the focus of university is to produce _new_ research, and a business's focus is to produce sustainable service for profit. Google should have a graduation mechanism for a product they launch, where they publicly announce that a product is out of beta, and can be depended on to exist. And if the product isn't ready to be supporte…

I'd say they run it like a marketplace. If a product isn't generating revenue, it gets axed. Which, given the size of Google is probably about the only way to run things. Hierarchies don't scale indefinitely. How many companies have we seen collapse due to an inability to react to ever changing market demands? Besides having an oracle for a CEO, I'd say running your company as a bunch of autonomous business units is…

Having worked at Google, this really isn't the case, at minimum because a large number of their business units are not and are never expected to be profitable. It is a bit difficult to describe what system is used to coordinate between business units, but it doesn't really resemble an economic marketplace.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#77

Post by FabHK »

My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1])

* switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has)

* use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS)

* use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently)

* use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs

* use Youtube either in private window, and/or download content once with youtube-dl

* use Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps instead of Google maps, though still revert to Google maps sometimes, lamentably. It's good. (I never log in, though.)

* long ago switched to different email for main email, and forwarded gmail account to it (and now, basically nobody emails to my old gmail address anymore). (In fact, I use a catch-all domain now (very easy to set up), and a fresh email for basically every account. Quite handy.)

* for contacts, photos, etc. I use Apple's built-in stuff. I do trust Apple a bit more (different business model; look at recent iPhone prices.)

* Signal, Wire, iMessage for messaging

All in all, I think a fairly degooglified life is eminently possible.

In response, people furthermore suggested:

* Firefox with Multi-Account Container function to separate browsing, or just a temporary session with `firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)`

* Lineage OS for Android phones (though somewhat controversial)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057709

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#78

Post by kgwgk »

ashelmire wrote: post #68
99052882514569 wrote: post #8

They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense t…

> They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money It seems they also discontinue products that make them money and continue products that lose them money. Their exchanges with the SEC [1] seem to suggest that YouTube loses money (otherwise why wouldn't they publish the numbers?), and if that becomes known public info, it may open them up to a host of legal and political problems. Regardless, if you d…

> (otherwise why wouldn't they publish the numbers?)

To prevent competitors, providers or customers from learning how profitable this particular business is. (Probably not the case here, but it’s an actual reason for companies to disclose as little as possible about their operations.)

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#79

Post by TeMPOraL »

radarsat1 wrote: post #49
tikkabhuna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked…

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#80

Post by mrighele »

99052882514569 wrote: post #8

They discontinue products that don't pan out and lose them money (like Chromecast Audio), and they improve features that detract from the user experience and muddy the waters in terms of ads/monetization in their view (YouTube annotations). They run their company as a constant stream of trial-and-error product launches, some of which succeed wildly and make them billions, others fail and are killed off. Makes sense t…

> Perhaps someone is confusing them with a charity or an Internet do-gooder enthusiasts club.

The amount of products that get launched and then closed is to me sign that Google is a company unable to manage product after launch (and probably even more before, for the business part). More than that it gives that message that you shouldn't use a Google product until it reaches a critical mass, or you risk to have it axed one day. As more people think this way it will be more difficult for any google product to reach that mass of users.

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